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Make sure your Android phone is wiped clean before you sell it.

Every day, tens of thousands of people sell or give away their old mobile phones. We decided to buy some of these used phones to test whether they had been wiped clean of their data. What we found was astonishing: 40,000 photos including 750 photos of partially nude women and more than 250 male nude selfies, 750 emails and texts, 250 names and addresses, a collection of anime porn, a complete loan application, and the identity of four of the previous phone owners.

How did we recover so much personal data?

The problem is that people thought they deleted files but the standard features that came with their operating system did not do the job completely. The operating system deleted the corresponding pointers in the file table and marked the space occupied by the file as free. But in reality, the file still existed and remained on the drive.

Avast bought 20 used phones from eBay and discovered that lots of personal data still remained on them.

Introduction to Android forensics (aka CSI: Android)

Digital forensics is a branch of science which deals with the recovery and investigation of materials found in digital devices. Forensics is usually mentioned in connection with crime, vaguely similar to criminal investigations on TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigationand NCIS. However, several experiments (1, 2), including this one, use methods of digital forensics as proof that people do not pay attention to what happens with their personal data when replacing their digital devices (computers, hard drives, cell phones). In this blog post series we will reveal what we managed to dig out from supposedly erased devices. The sensitive information includes pictures (even very private ones!), videos, contacts, SMS messages, Facebook chat logs, Google searches, GPS location coordinates, and more.

What happens to the file when it is “deleted”?

When people want to delete a file, most will use the standard features that come with their operating system. After it’s done, they consider the unwanted data to be gone forever. However, this is not true.

The Internet has become a virtual flea market, with online consumer-to-consumer sites like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist selling millions of products every day. Used smartphones are a popular sales item on eBay – more than 80,000 people list their phones for sale each day. It seems like a smart way to make some extra money, but AVAST has found out that many fail to protect their identity in the process.

AVAST recovers an abundance of personal data from used smartphones

Most sellers delete all of their personal data prior to selling their used devices… or so they think. We purchased 20 used Android phones off eBay and used simple and easily available recovery software to restore deleted files. The amount of data we were able to retrieve was astonishing and proves that simply deleting is not enough.

Our analysts found the following:

More than 40,000 stored photos

More than 1,500 family photos of children

More than 750 photos of women in various stages of undress

More than 250 selfies of what appear to be the previous owner’s manhood

More than 1,000 Google searches

More than 750 emails and text messages

More than 250 contact names and email addresses

Four previous owners’ identities

One completed loan application

One phone even had a competitor’s security software installed, but unfortunately it did not help the former owner as it revealed the most personal information out of all the phones we analyzed.

No one cares about my old photos, messages and Google searches, right?

Wrong! As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Now add private Facebook messages that include geo-location, Google searches for open job positions in a specific field, media files, and phone contacts. Put all of these pieces together to complete the puzzle and you have a clear picture of who the former smartphone owner was. Stalkers, enemies, and thieves can abuse personal data to stalk, blackmail and steal people’s identities. They can use this information to watch people’s every move, exploit their strange fetishes, open credit cards in their name, or even continue what they started by further selling their personal information online.

How to permanently delete and overwrite data from your Android phone

Deleting files from your Android phone before selling it or giving it away is not enough. You need to overwrite your files, making them irretrievable. To do so, install avast! Anti-Theft from the Google Play Storefor free. Once you have the app installed, turn on the “thorough wipe” feature within the app. You will then need to create a my.avast account to connect to the phone (this allows users to remotely wipe their phones in theft cases as well). The final step is to wipe the phone clean, which will delete and overwrite all of your personal data.

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Question of the week: I have avast! Free Antivirus on my computer and I love it, but isn’t antivirus for a smartphone overkill? I mean, there are not so many threats to a phone, are there?

This is a question being asked by lots of security firms lately, and the answer is a resounding, YES. As smartphones and tablets become increasingly popular, so do threats that target mobile devices exclusively. Two particular studies published lately have pointed to an increase in mobile malware over the past year.

Android is in the bull’s eye

Mobile security firm NQ Mobile states in its study that security threats from mobile malware are on the rise and nearly 95% of it targets Google’s Android platform. Read more…

Researchers have determined that an attack which can wipe data from Samsung Android devices when visiting a malicious website can also be used to lock the SIM cards or completely wipe all of the data from many other Android phones. In addition to web pages, the attack can be triggered through SMS, or by a rouge NFC tag or QR code.

Mobile geek Dylan Reeve explains how the attack works. Computerworld summarizes it like this, “The attack can be launched from a Web page by loading a “tel:” URI (uniform resource identifier) with a special factory reset code inside an iframe. If the page is visited from a vulnerable device, the dialer application automatically executes the code and performs a factory reset.”

Check if your smartphone is vulnerable

Here is a way for you to check if your phone is vulnerable to this remote wipe threat: Visit http://dylanreeve.com/phone.php on your Android device, and if your phone is vulnerable, you’ll immediately see your phone’s IMEI number pop up. I checked my HTC Google Nexus One this way, and it came back as being vulnerable. Other phones reported to be affected include the HTC One X, Motorola Defy, Sony Experia Active, Sony Xperia Arc S, and the HTC Desire. Reeve says that Samsung fixed the USSD/MMI code execution issue for Galaxy S III devices, but it appears that all 4.1-based builds are safe, and some 4.0.4 builds as well.

Currently avast! Mobile Security is actively blocking URLs containing malicious code that triggers the exploit. Our Android users can expect an update containing protection against this kind of attack soon. We’ll let you know when that is released.

Edit: We are pleased to confirm that the newest update of avast! Free Mobile Security protects against USSD attacks, without installing additional tools. All you need to do is to accept the program update offered by avast! on your smartphone. Please share this message with your friends who are Android smartphone owners. They might need avast! Mobile Security too. Thank you.

Modern teenagers would rather socialize with friends on the web than get in a car and go see them in person. Is this a glitch in the matrix, or for real?

It’s real. Recent studies reveal that being digitally connected is more important to young people than the freedom a car brings. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that the current number of American 17 year-olds with driver’s licenses has dropped by 50% from 30 years ago. The pattern is repeated in countries with quality Internet access, including Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Norway and South Korea, where the number of young drivers has also declined over recent years.

The theory is that virtual contact has reduced the need for young people to get together face-to-face. A November Gartner study supports this, showing that 46% of people aged 18 to 24 would take internet access over access to a car of their own. This is not too surprising when you consider the price of a car, insurance and fuel compared to the price of an iPhone, for example.

Does this mean that dependence on digital devices instead of wheels for socializing can save lives? Could be. Read more…

The RSA Conference – the largest gathering of security vendors and the companies who buy their products – was held in San Francisco last month. Avast was in attendance, and I had the pleasure of moderating apanel on mobile security. Mobile security was also one of the top topics permeating the entire event. What I heard on the panel and throughout the conference, and what has been reinforced from my discussions with analysts and consultants to businesses, should have you all pretty worried.

The good news is that businesses want to embrace employees use of mobile phones and tablets. And it’s not just the biggest companies doing so: even small businesses are eager adopters of mobile technologies. After all, employees are more accessible and more productive when they can use their mobile devices for work. However, these are your devices; they are not the company’s and shouldn’t be treated as such. And that’s the challenge.

Businesses have legitimate concerns that these devices are inherentlyinsecure, and that consumers don’t always secure their devices to the same level businesses do their PCs. They are also concerned about all the corporate data that these devices contain or can access, and that their loss or theft can compromise a company. And they are concerned that people will misuse their access to this data now that it’s on their person device.

The problem is that businesses want more security and control over your phone then they should have or even need: even more control than they have over the PCs they provide you.

Because there are maliciousapps, they want to keep a catalog of every app you install and be able to remove those applications without prior notice to you.

Because mobile devices can hold private corporate data, they want the ability to wipe all data on your phone, also without prior notice to you.

Because you could potentially misuse the phone by transferring corporate data between a business app (like email) and a personal app (like Facebook), they want to be able to monitor everything you do on that phone: your call logs, your text messages, all your social networking activity, all your browsing activity.

This blatant company disregard for employees’ privacy and property all in the name of security has gotten completely out of hand. One product that was given prominent attention at the conference basically rooted your device to put a monitoring and management layer underneath the operating system. Besides taking any semblance of control of your device away from you, this procedure would likely lead to voiding the warranty for many of your devices, especially Apple devices.

Using your mobile devices for work purposes should not require you giving up all your privacy rights or giving your company effective ownership of your device, without having to pay for it. If your company is letting you use your phone or tablet for work purposes, especially if it’s for more than email, then you should take a close look at your organization’s mobile policies – not just for what you should or should not be doing, but for what your company could be doing.